There are times when one wonders if the scriptwriters for a show & the author of the source material being adapted ever talk to each other. When series, particularly longer series, feel like they're becoming increasingly unfocused as the source material begins to run out, you'd think that the script writer & author would work together to at least come up with a framework for where the story is going so the adaptation knows what to focus on without deviating too much from where the author plans to go with their story. Sadly, it seems in Log Horizon 2's case, either nobody knows where things are going, or nobody is communicating it. (note this review assumes you've seen LH1)
Remember how LH1 ended with a climactic battle against the goblin king's forces whilst also revealing a new, human threat in the form of Nureha, guild leader of Plant Hwyaden who seems as powerful a mage as Shiroe? Well it seems the author or script writers forgot, because none of that really matters in LH2. Instead, LH2 focuses on three events that all feel like they're setting the ground for something big, but they don't know what. First is a mysterious player killer in Akihabara, somehow able to get around the zone's rules against combat between players. Following on from that (although both events occur at the same time) Shiroe seeks to deal with the financial problems the round table are facing by leading an epic raid on an El Dorado mine where all the world's gold is alleged to come from. These things concluded, the characters finally get around preparing for the prospect of war by...sending the younger guild members on a fetch quest so they can make magic bags.
All these stories continue Log Horizons rather enjoyable combining of a fantasy adventure setting with MMO rules, & the interesting ways they come together. The first story arc occurs against a backdrop the sudden & destabalising event of all the flavour text for the games many items suddenly becoming real, resulting in, among other things, Crusty being sucked into apparent oblivion by his weapon. Other issues not raised in LH1 are explored, including the idea of mortality & what it's actually like for the adventurers to die & how different people are responding to their being trapped in this new world. We meet characters that we wouldn't expect, such as a Chinese farmbot & Shiroe's alt character Roe2, who also seem to have come to life. Friction between the People of the Land & adventurers continues & we also, finally, start getting a hint at why the players of Elder Tale were sucked into the game in the first place.
Unfortunately, LH2 tends to skip over the more interesting parts while doing very little to try & tie everything together. In LH1 you had a real sense of progression between the different story arcs. Things started with everyone just getting used to functioning in this new world, which led to the Akihabara adventurers trying to better organise themselves, which led to their becoming diplomatically involved with the nearby PotL kingdoms & so on. There's no such sense of one thing building into another in LH2. Each story just kind of happens & ends with no real apparent impact. We're told it's impactful, sure. But the point is we don't see it in the same way you could in LH1.
It doesn't help that LH2 is full of what can only be thought of as filler episodes. LH2 is adapting two less novels than LH1 did (3 & 5 respectively), & it really feels like they're trying to spread less content over the same number of episodes. One particularly egregious example comes in the El Dorado raid, which involves returning Silver Sword guild leader William giving an episode long speech that boils down to "I'm a sad loser irl, but in Elder Tale I feel important." The raid itself is actually quite enjoyable, as it's fun watching Shiroe & the adventurers reacting to a raid zone that has been designed specifically to be unbeatable. The ending is a massive anticlimax, though.
LH2 also has an annoying tendency to introduce interesting ideas only to ignore them. The aforementioned Chinese bot character just sorta shows up for a bit before wandering off. Kanami, the tits & fists former leader of the mythical Tea Party shows up completely at random, first in a story one of Plant Hwyaden's leaders is telling another which gets cut off with a convenient "I don't know what happened after this" just as his story (which is the most interesting thing to happen in LH2 up to this point) was in danger of running into two episodes.
Adventurer mortality, & how adventurers see images of their real life in the time between dying & resurrecting, is touched on on a couple of occasions, most notably in the form of the Odyssey Knights; adventurers who seek out death so they can briefly glimpse their past lives before returning. Unfortunately, all the Odyssey knights are really used for is to let Touya give a boyscout speech about the importance of living. What the characters actually have to say about the subject is equally disappointing, the writing not being nearly up to expressing the complexities of the ideas being discussed.
Conversely, LH2 is happy to waste a lot of time on things I have no interest in. The magic bag fetch quest takes up something like eight episodes, almost all of which is spent just watching the kids of Log Horizon wander about being happy as Izuma learns to be more confident in her musicianship. We apparently only have five minutes for the round table to discuss ideas like how to deal with adventurers who can't cope with being trapped in Elder Tale, but there's time for an entire valentine's day episode. Considering the apparent impending war that was teased at the end of LH1, everything in LH2 just feels like it's trying to fill time & hopes you don't notice that for most of the season nothing really happens to progress the story.
Speaking of romance, LH continues having some of the most awful relationship writing in anime. Nyanta, everyone's favourite middle aged furvert, continues to groom little red moeblob Serara, which the other characters seem to find hilarious & sweet but I find disturbing & painful to watch. That oh so funny not-love triangle between a NEET (Shiroe) a shutin (Atatsuki) & an under-aged girl (Minori) continues to rear its ugly head as well. Oh & in case you thought the flirting between Naotsugu & Marie was too normal, worry not; for now there is Tetora, an idol who takes a liking to Naotsugu. This is apparently hilarious because Tetora is actually a guy but Naotsugu is the only character who doesn't realise. I guess it had to be made weirder because the relationship between Rudy & Isuzu has greater prominence in LH2 & there can only be room for one "normal" relationship.
Planet Hwyaden is a group that LH2 also completely fails to integrate into the story. Remember how Nureha seemed like she was going to become the antagonist of LH2? Well somewhere between that & the start of LH2 it seems something important got lost, because she is now the boot-licking bitch of some elf member of the guild, literally eating dirt off the floor. It strikes me that it would be quite an important piece of information to let us know how she went from one state to the other, but LH2 doesn't seem to think so.
Indeed quite what Planet Hwyaden are supposed to be doing in LH2 isn't clear. At first they seem to be built up as an example of how adventurers have responded to the challenge of organising themselves in different ways, taking a more authoritarian approach to governing than the more mercantile oligarchy, round table of guilds in Akihabara. But as the season continues & the supposed showdown between the two recedes into memory, it feels like they just become a stand in for whenever the show needs a bad guy. That is until the final arc pretty much completely abandons the idea of war between adventurers in favour of a new enemy, at which point one wonders why Plant Hwyaden were introduced at all.
Beyond that, I feel compelled to voice one personal gripe I have with LH, that being the continued degradation of Atatsuki as a character. It seems so long ago now that she started out in LH as a shy but pretty badass ninja. One of the things I didn't like about LH1 was how her development through the season felt like she was more & more being pushed into the role of the longing lover watching from the shadows. LH2 continues this with gusto, to the point that Shiroe can unironically say "you're starting to become quite the ninja" like it's not a massive insult. Between her & Nureha it's almost like the writers find the idea of powerful women as important characters too hard to comprehend.
It was perhaps a bit of a surprise to see LH2 come only a year after LH1 with the same number of episodes, given the comparative lack of source material to draw from. In addition to this, it kind of feels like LH2 either lacked the time & resources of LH1's production, or at least it doesn't seem to have been as well managed. Studio Deen don't have a Stirling reputation among anime fans, & while I can't say LH2 looks bad, it does feel a bit lackluster compared to LH1 (at least as I remember it), particularly towards the end where it feels they hadn't accounted for the action scenes that the story called for. Occasionally characters do go noticeably off model during combat or when viewed from an odd angle, which is always fun to spot. But given that LH is not as action focused as a lot of fantasy shows of it's ilk, one can forgive it for the the most part.
LH2, then, is another example of a second season that struggles to maintain the momentum of the first. Stuck trying to stretch less material over the same episode count as LH1, it feels like the writers just grabbed whatever they could out of the books with no real idea of how it all fits together in the grand scheme things. Had they been able to wait another year for more books to be written, or gone with a 13 episode length instead of 25, I think they could have told a more focused, concise story that felt like it was worth picking up after LH1. As it is, unless & until they announce a third season I see no reason for anyone to watch LH2. Even then, you'd be better off just reading the cliffnotes or watching an abridged version than sitting through all 25 episodes.
